Category: Digital experiences

LAMP Stack vs. MEAN Stack

For both mobile and web-driven applications, we need server-side infrastructure and code to run on them. For many years, LAMP has been a reliable infrastructure that involves Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, Perl or Python. However, due to Javascript’s applicability to both server and client side scripting, another stack is widely being considered as an alternative to LAMP – the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, Node.js).

Both of these stacks have got their own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s say PHP lacks in innovation whereas Nods.js has light development history and is, of course, innovative but at the same time does not offer the same level of maturity. If we talk about privacy, it has become a major concern now a days, and users tend to disable JS and don’t let run any unknown code on their machine, which could result in breaking your web application if it is fully dependent on JS. 

Below I will detail each platform’s key capabilities and use cases to understand the difference better.

It is a free and one of the earliest stacks for web development. It includes the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database and PHP application software, and is easy to deploy, develop and customize. It is sufficiently secure and has a big support community. One of the greatest benefits of LAMP is its open source nature.

Some of the variants:

• WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP): A Microsoft Windows OS (Operating System) equivalent that’s easy to get started with. The WIMP stack (Windows, IIS, MSSQL Server, ASP.net) is similar, but relies on Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) instead of Apache for Web serving and ASP.net instead of Perl, PHP, or Python for programmability.
• LAPP (Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP): IT is a PostgreSQL database variation that’s optimized for enterprise-level projects.
• MAMP (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, PHP): A MacOS X operating system variation and is available for Windows and Mac.
• XAMPP (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl): It includes an FTP server, which is cross-platform, and is able to run on Linux, Mac operating and Windows systems.

High availability and load balancing
When there is a need for high uptime and large requests, LAMP can be a preferable choice to achieve high availability with multiple web and database servers and allows distribution of workload across multiple servers. To perform logical aggregation of web servers, a load balancer is placed in front of them. Various forms of redundancy can provide high-availability of web services, making it possible to experience downtime without actually interrupting the service provided by LAMP instance. Such redundancy setups can also handle hardware failure. 

MEAN stack

Custom Zendesk help desk module using Zendesk API

Zendesk is a customer service solution that is designed to be simple, and is currently being used by many of the world’s largest organizations to provide support to their customers. It is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, which implies that your organization will pay a monthly fee for every registered member of your support team using the product.

Zendesk will take care of the hosting for you and the other logistics for running a complex website, allowing you to focus on important tasks — providing great support to your customers.

This platform is designed to handle customer support for any ecommerce site, and provides options for customers to comment, submit ticket and for admin to have track of the submitted tickets in the admin panel. Here I am going to share steps to develop a custom Zendesk help desk module.

Some fundamental terms and definitions associated with ZenDesk: 

Ticket

An assistance request submitted by the customer. The term is selected to be as generic as possible, to capture a broad range of requests submitted to the customer service team.

Field

Before a ticket is submitted, the user will provide details about his/her request by entering values into the ticket fields. Default fields are – Subject, Description, and Priority. You may add custom fields, which capture more specific information in the ticket.

Comment

These are pieces of text that are added to a ticket and initiates the conversation. Comments can be public or private.

Agent

A person who works for the support organization and provides assistance to customers. Agent access to tickets will vary according to the permissions set up by administrators, but agents can typically access a wide range of tickets submitted by customers.

Assignee

When an individual member of the support team is working on a ticket, he/she will be set as the assignee of that ticket. The assignee of a ticket must always be an agent, though he may be an administrator too. This is because administrators typically set up and manage Zendesk instances, but are not involved in solving tickets. But of course, there is nothing stopping administrators from doing so.

Channel

There are nine different ways for customers to create a ticket in Zendesk, and these are referred to as channels. The options include the Help Center, email, chat, phone, the Feedback Tab, Facebook, Twitter, ticket sharing, and the API. The various channels are one of the great advantages of Zendesk, because allowing customers to contact your support team using the method which they find easy is the foremost step to creating a positive customer experience.

HelpDesk Magento Module

We developed a module HelpDesk for front end of a Magento site to let customers comment and submit their issues in a particular category on the concerned site only, instead of going to a third party website and submit tickets/comments.

Configuration 
HelpDesk gives settings options in system >> configuration menu. As shown, it asks for a Zendesk API url, user email address and Zendesk API key for configuration settings.

Module’s requests get authenticated with these settings. The Zendesk API key is provided by Zendesk portal when you register there.

Access helpdesk
HelpDesk provides frontend interface at http://yoursite.com/helpdesk. When you access this page, it will display all the categories you created for your Zendesk account. If you update your category structure at Zendesk portal, the changes will be reflected here. Categories may be related to several products.

Under each category, you will find sections and for each section, articles related to that section. When you click on any of the article, you will find details of that particular article and an option to sign-in and give your comments or put any query if you have.

If you click any of the categories, you will get a list of all of its sections. By clicking on sections, you will get a list of articles. All articles have a text field for the description of the topic, and an option to login and comment. The admin of the site can reply to those comments and resolve customer issues.

Search trends in 2016 – Google Knowledge Graph

Various changes have affected search trends in 2016, and based on the new opportunities marketers have been trying all ways to drive web traffic to their business. One of the prominent 2016 search trends is – Google Knowledge Graph.

Google through its incredibly powerful tool – Knowledge Graph, takes content from relevant websites and displays that on the results page. If the user enters a simple query into the search engine, instead of getting a list of pages containing the information, he will see a box displayed at the top of the page with factual response to the query, taken from a reliable website. Although handy for a user, it poses challenges for websites striving for online space, diverting traffic away from their website. 

Facebook messenger will soon open for publishers from April 2016

Facebook will now let publishers distribute content through its messenger and will announce this update at its annual developer conference in April. Mark Zuckerberg hinted about the future of the messaging platform in his upcoming Facebook F8 Developer Conference in April.

Last year Facebook announced that they are going to be expanding the messenger platform to a more robust form. The famous Facebook messenger will now soon allow publishers share their content automatically, which is not currently possible through the social network’s messaging service.

Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Facebook has started testing a tool for other developers to build chat bots. Publishers are increasingly exploring messaging apps for sharing their content, such as – BBC News uses Viber and WhatsApp, The Huffington Post uses Viber, The Economist uses Line, among others. German tabloid Bild, a famous German newspaper, is analyzing delivering news to its readers through Facebook Messenger but it still uses some private tool for that. You can read more on this in the article by NiemanLab.

Once Facebook allows publishers to use its messaging app, publishers will have access to another platform they can use for sharing their stories.

Last month, Facebook also reported that its messenger has grown to more than 800 Mn monthly active users all over the world, making it a top used app compared to other similar options in the market. As the number of users grows, publishers are more attracted to selling brands via sponsored messages. Publishers are waiting for Facebook’s upcoming F8 conference to find out updates regarding the messenger, which will allow them to distribute their message or stories through the messenger.

Initially, Facebook is targeting partnerships with bigger businesses as their customer feedbacks are more consistent and fast. At present, users can’t buy things from businesses directly via the messenger app, but when it will get open for businesses, it would help in engaging buyers more actively. As we see more businesses join this new messenger feature, marketers will get more proactive to supercharge their digital marketing strategies.

Social media marketing trends 2016

The same laws of attraction never remain for too long in the social media marketing landscape. And while we all expect new trends and updates, more noteworthy is the ‘why’ that motivates these changes. Knowing ‘why’ will better develop businesses to stay ahead of the curve and shift their marketing activities aligning with audience attentions. Here are some key social media marketing trends to keep an eye on: Engagement will be the focus, not virality A post going viral could come out as a result, but it couldn’t be the aim. Not everything you post will be seen by each of your followers. With maturing social media marketing practices, we are seeing a shift from the content that should be viral towards the content that connects with your audience. This shift seems more feasible and favorable, as the individuals who most likely see your content on social are the ones who already like your brand to begin with. Those core followers are acquainted to your message – so what could be better than beginning from there, to build your social brand? How do you do this? Understand what your target audience is looking for and expecting from your business. Create and deliver that content, and they will like and share it among their networks. Deliver impactful customer experiences and that will yield you happy customers, who gradually become your brand advocates, and help spread your content throughout their own extended networks. So you see – ‘Post going viral’ is great, but ‘brand advocacy’ is more convincing, and probably a better strategic aim. On-the-go social updates will sway Instant or should I say on-the-go updates, have always been a significant aspect of social media. In 2016, posts that are more ‘in-the-moment’ are supposed to dominate than others which are scheduled or posted after the event. Live streaming apps like Hangouts on Air, Periscope are allowing for broadcasting live videos. And did you know? – Periscope-ers together watch forty years of live video each day. Instagram and Snapchat also support on-the-go posts in contrast to after-event posts, and if the trend catches on, you can forget about scheduling all your company’s social media posts in advance. Identifying relevant metrics to track Looking at the current trends, it is notable that organic reach has fallen radically; in fact a page would be fortunate to have 10% of its total followers see any one of its Facebook posts, and that renders ‘Page Likes’ a less important target to strive for. While metrics like followers, shares, likes, re-tweets and comments may be treated as indicators in certain contexts, the actual figures that matter are conversions. Subsequent actions taken through the posts, click-through rates, leads or purchases generated are the numbers that need focus. We are already seeing it in the horizon – Facebook’s ‘Conversion Lift’ metrics leave behind the basic effects of soft numbers and intend to show businesses exactly how their on-platform activities add to their bottom line results. Similarly, Twitter has employed a similar system to provide a more accurate summary of campaign results. No denying that shares and engagements play a vital part in the whole marketing process, but the real numbers are what brands/marketers are going to focus as social media metrics in 2016. Think mobile first in social media too As social media marketing grows to an anticipated $11 billion by 2017, the enduring shift to mobile is a top choice for marketers. Mobile users exchange content 2x as often as their desktop counterparts. Know the facts: –          85% of Facebook users access the network via mobile and over 1/3 access it only on mobiles. –          Twitter mobile users are 66% more likely to retweet. –          Pinterest content is shared 3 times more often on mobile than on desktop. –          40% of LinkedIn users use mobile app to look for a new job So now the question is – how does your social post look like on a tab or smartphone? How the tweeted pictures look like on a Windows/Android/iOS handset? Are they optimized to load in a few seconds? Note that an image which is clear on social channels on desktop is not necessarily going to be clearly readable on an iPhone. GIFs and immersive video growing bigger A certain shift can be seen from a long-format story to short snack-able videos, attuned with the consumer’s content consumption habits. Consumers are excited and welcoming micro-video and GIFs. Interesting formats like cinemagraph have evolved and taken visual storytelling to indeed a next level by giving a twist to GIF based content. Did you know? – Cinemagraphs get 60% more engagement than static images. And we observe that social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Google, and Twitter are all embracing natively hosted video and integrating GIF content. The 15 seconds brand centric approach has reigned Instagram, and the 5 seconds pre roll ads have interested brands and viewers the most on YouTube. With Facebook and Google adding 360 degree video capabilities and Virtual Reality content, brands be all set to create more immersive moving content, to find more opportunities for social engagement. New players to enter the social space Marketers are predicting two new big players to come in the social space this year. The frequency with which new services and platforms are entering the playing field, shows us that it’s probable that new players might join the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in 2016 and grab some share in the already competitive market space. What do you say? Do you find something missing that you think will happen in social media marketing in 2016? Let us know what you foresee.

Top 11 web design trends for 2016

In past few years, we have seen a lot of shifts in the website design and development domain. 2016 is anticipated to be the year of many advancements in web design; and I have summed up some of them here. Technology advancements: Sitecore and Magento 2.0 are evolving as two advanced website development platforms, which a business can look upon. User behavior: Users are much more impatient now a days, and fast access to your website will win them. People tend to switch to other sites if your website doesn’t load quickly. Also, the social channels are important aspects of building your presence on internet, where users spend most of their time. Plan social campaigns – either paid or organic to enhance your presence. Content Management System (CMS): It is a must to have for your website as it keeps your website up-to-date without depending on developers every time. CMS helps you manage your content on your own – as a business executive, as marketing executive, or for that matter even an HR executive. Simplified website navigation: Simplified and predictable model of navigation is the need of the hour. Present important things up-front and make browsing a comfortable experience for your visitors. A very neatly designed navigation I found is of TIME magazine. Responsive design: Most of the websites that were perfectly fine few years ago might not stand out today in the light of modern design trends. Mobile/tablet views of website must provide seamless experience to your visitors. You may want to refer – https://advaiya.com/ SEO friendly structure: Search engine algorithms keep on updating frequently, so do the websites. Always make sure that the website structure is appropriate and live for a longer time. Quick fixes on website structure will let you end up spending more in meeting all the SEO standards. Right content strategy: CONTENT, which has been the king of website since past couple of years, will still remain the king and need to be written keeping your audience as well as search engines in mind. Social sharing: Social media plays an important role in digital marketing trends of 2016; hence your content should be available on social as well. Allow your visitors to share more and more content on their social network by providing quick social sharing options. Some readily available tools in market are addthis, sharethis or Pay-with-a-tweet. Touch friendly: Make sure that your website is touch friendly. Mouse-over is not that effective now, because in case of touch devices, it doesn’t exist anymore. Sliders/banners: Sooner or later, these might probably end. Businesses now generally have a unified messaging and only want to focus on that. Adding multiple sliders on homepage dilutes the messaging. You may want to visit https://advaiya.com/ for reference. Apps: For e-commerce business to sustain in 2016 and further, mobile app is a must as it makes the customer through a better and comfortable journey. It helps keeping your prospect stick to your offering and avoid comparison with other similar portals. With strategically designed apps, the decision making time becomes less and people end up buying more quickly. Apart from these, some other enhancements could be around the usage of new icons, fonts, typography and custom graphics, as there is a wide variety available to choose from now when compared to a few years back. Also, always make sure that your visitor get to know more about you and your existing customers, and their thoughts. Few things that could help are – highlighting the reviews, case studies and client testimonials on your website to help visitors relate themselves and take a step ahead in engaging with you. These are my thoughts on latest web design trends. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts on these.

Magento 2.0: Some exciting features for ecommerce websites in 2016

With the new version of Magento unveiled, there are some really good features that have come with this version 2.0. Here is a list of top 10 Magento 2.0 features: Compatibility increased with other popular platforms Component oriented architecture New Layout elements CSS Preprocessing jQuery JavaScript framework Enhanced performance and scalability Directories structure Automated testing Enhanced security Full page caching mechanism in-built Let me start with very simple questions, which you might have in your mind. Is it the right time to upgrade to Magneto 2.0 from Magento 1.9.x or not? Is Magento 2 migration worth it? How smooth or painful the process would be to upgrade to Magento 2.x? It’s enticing to stick with the already existing version and resist changing to suspend the pain of switching over from the old platform and extensions. But with the version 2.0 (for both Enterprise and Community), you get better and new extensions and an opportunity for old extensions to get a new look. If you want to know what all Magento 2 migration can bring and is it worth upgrading, you must read this post. I am listing some pretty good reasons to plan your Magento 2 migration / upgrade soon: Enhanced performance and scalability Magento 2 delivers speed with the incredibly fast page load time for home, category and product pages (<1.5second per page) on first view and its even faster when the pages will cache (<0.75 seconds per page) Each step has a checkout process designed for the page tool. With a reduction of 1.9 seconds per step, you can convert more visitors. It provides better shopping experience by minimizing and bundling JavaScript, compressing images and by integrating Varnish cache for better site performance. Magento also has scaled to help you handle your busiest days. Magento supports 3.5 million page views per hour and more than 25,000 orders per hour. Usage of database for order management, catalog and checkout are some features you must be thankful to. Rich User Experience Personalization: The experiences with personalization has improved – on site behavior or other data influence content, promotion and product recommendations. Easy product discovery: With Magento 2.0 migration, your customers can easily narrow their product options and find out exactly what they are looking for with powerful search. The layered navigation now brings price, color and category. Fast Checkout: Two-step checkout process is now faster. For other information page, customers can create an account with one click without interrupting the transaction. Is it a good time to plan your upgrade to Magento 2.0? It majorly depends on the condition of your existing site/portal. If your site is working well and running smoothly on Magento versions such as 1.9 CE and 1.14 EE, you might need not hurry. In fact, you can start exploring Magento 2 or discuss with some future plans. If your Magento version is a bit older, or you are facing some serious troubles on your site/portal, it would be a great time to plan for an upgrade as quickly as you can. How smooth or painful process can it be? Although the migration tool is ready, but be prepared for the process – it’s a major release and the process might involve some complexities. This tool has been designed to help you and your custom ecommerce solutions partner with the store setup, products, customers, orders, etc. Also, please note that the theme and code customizations, which include third party extensions would not be transferred. You will have to redo all those customizations on Magento 2.0. In conclusion Overall, to conclude, I would recommend you to discuss with your enterprise ecommerce solutions partner or contact us to make a detailed analysis report whether you should or should not upgrade. The new Magento 2.0 features would definitely bring along good things. Some of the examples could be: you can take it as a new chance to improve overall usability of your site, get rid of your old legacy code, rethink about your business as a whole, and do much more. Add in the comments, your thoughts and what changes are you most excited about?

Web presence and digital marketing solutions

In this highly advanced digital age, web presence is crucial to enthrall customers, prospects, business partners and investors who are looking for your products and services. Businesses that optimize their web presence through digital marketing realize improved engagement and better brand visibility. By leveraging the latest technology platforms, Advaiya help its clients to build a strong online presence and connect with their target audience and relevant stakeholders. We facilitate our clients to deliver high quality, relevant and impactful experiences across multiple modern platforms with relevant assets including robust positioning and messaging frameworks, go-to-market strategy, appropriate content, and many more. We create a context aware positioning and communication approach across all aspects of marketing – plan, content, execution, automation, and governance. Web Presence We offer remarkable design for your website which are fully-customizable and mobile responsive with compelling content and modern aesthetics. We make sure that the brand culture reflects through the website while ensuring to keep the UI clean, intuitive and beautiful with reduced mouse clicks and lesser eye movements. Our focus is to address underlying customer desires via intelligent personalization and leveraging the power of content and rich media. Search Engine Optimization To showcase clients’ capabilities on internet, it is important to stand out on prominent search engines and to ensure this, an effective SEO in place is significant. Starting from the keyword analysis, content optimization, code level analysis, off-page and on-page optimization, and social media integration, we analyze the specific industry, competitors, and the appropriate keywords for ranking the website on leading search engines. Our SEO packages ensure that you not only get better rankings and increase in traffic, but also enhance brand awareness. Social Media Marketing Advaiya, with its robust social media marketing strategies helps businesses grow in their segment and compete. We help our clients discover the correct platform based on their audience, plan and design overall digital transformation strategy and focus marketing efforts correspondingly. When we engage with any client, their objective becomes ours. We understand that every business is unique, and their marketing goals are distinct. Our consultants strategize marketing plans by deeply understanding the current state of clients’ business, their customer’s journey and align them with the overall business strategy and goals. We always strive towards a long-term partnership with our customers, and allocate a team that is – enthusiastic, passionate, persistent, and determined. We have different set of digital marketing offerings for small, medium, and large businesses, which ensure that our customers get good return on their digital marketing investments. Our offerings: Digital strategy Digital presence assessment and gap analysis Strategy development – digital presence and marketing Web and devices experience Intuitive and adaptive design development Design and development for multiple interfaces and devices Interactive assets and new media creation Media, interactive widgets and apps Whitepapers, and presentations Brochures, and datasheets Infographics Branding assets and templates Personalization Personalized websites and apps Real-time analysis of multiple parameters Checkout experience optimization Digital SEO/SEM Keyword analysis and site optimization Site and page indexing Paid search management Social media enablement Social media tools and content creation Social media marketing and advertising Social media optimization Web, social, and mobile analytics Customer analytics Social and sentiment analytics Mobile analytics Web infrastructure and content management Enable and support web/digital infrastructure Digital content and asset management Implementation of web standards and best practices

How to choose a PHP framework

With the increasing popularity among web frameworks, it can get a bit difficult to decide which framework will be best suitable for your projects. While some take their decision on the basis of performance, others may look for a substantial built-in functionality or a well-documented framework. Here in this blog we will take a look on what features and factors should be considered before choosing any framework for the project. A PHP framework provides us with reusable code and a foundation to build web apps. It also helps in improving productivity and creating more stable sites. Most of the popular frameworks are based around MVC (model-view-controller), ensuring the separation of logic and presentation which in turn helps us to write clean and reusable code. Before deciding on a framework for your application, you should understand the needs and requirements of your application. Here are a few questions you should consider before deciding on a particular framework: 1.      What is the main goal of your application? Will you be developing an ecommerce portal, a social platform, a blog or a business website? An ecommerce portal will require a framework with the facility for payment integration, while a blog site may need a framework with options for various themes and plugins to choose from. 2.      Is good documentation available? Finding difficulty in understanding someone else’s code is every developer’s story. Picking a framework with a good documentation will make it easier for the programmers to understand the source-code and develop applications. 3.      Does the framework have an active user base and development support? If the framework you are working on ends up feebly with no active development support, you can either continue using the framework and maintain it yourself or re-code your application to use a new framework. In order to make sure you don’t get stuck with a framework on a dead-end, take time to research the community of a framework while the project is still in the planning phase. The Frameworks Let’s discuss some of the popular PHP frameworks:   CakePHP It is the most popular and one of the oldest framework. The idea behind CakePHP was to make developing applications fast by implementing “convention over configuration”. With the features like fast coding, better security and Ajax support, CakePHP helps in creating robust business websites which are completely customizable and in accordance with the W3C standards. Like last year when we started working on Neohapsis website, CakePHP was the mutual choice as client wanted a hacker safe website and this framework comes with built-in tools which covers security to a certain level. For example, it takes care of SQL injection, data validation, form spoofing and CSRF. Another website that we developed for Nucleus Software is a CMS based easy to update website. Using conventions from the framework we created admin backend, whole foundation of which is based on basic CRUD functionality.    CodeIgniter CodeIgniter is a lightweight framework that provides simple platform to develop full-featured web applications. This is a perfect fit for developing any application from small scale informative website to an e-commerce solution. Having worked on multiple MVC platforms, I have learnt that when the key area of concern is scalability and ease of programming, CodeIgniter is the most suitable option. With loads of libraries, plug-ins and helpers available, it takes care of complex programming, all the while maintaining the performance. Here are a few benefits that I like with CodeIgniter: It’s easy to configure and customize as per the requirements It’s built with a simple to understand folder structure It makes programming quick and developer-friendly Easy integration with third-party libraries Easy to learn documentation and tutorials   Laravel Laravel still in its early days has recently gained popularity among PHP developers. The main reason behind is built-in features like “flexible routing”, “easy database interaction”, “plugins”. This framework is suitable for various sectors like RESTful application, small business app or big enterprise solution. Laravel offers a number of features which makes it so popular: Eloquent ORM: It offers a very powerful active-record implementation, which makes it easy to perform any database query. Flexible Routing: A simple routing mechanism, which is very helpful for developing your own APIs. Form Model Binding: In a scenario where we want to edit/update any records in a database, we can use form model binding to populate the form with respective values from database table. Authentication: Laravel offers a built-in authentication library which is simple to implement. To perform a login operation, we just need to pass an array of credentials, while for logout this one liner works (Auth::logout();). View Existing Routes: With the continuous expansion of application, it gets difficult to check what routes have been registered. Laravel offers a simple command (php artisan routes) to list down all the registered routes in application. Commands: You can write your custom commands to perform tasks like fetch data from a third-party API, backup script for application, etc. You can run it as CLI or use them for CRON jobs. Form Validation Rules: Laravel offers various rules that can be used to add validation on any object. There are few other frameworks that you may consider.   Zend Framework Based on the object oriented approach, Zend Framework is most suitable for experienced developers and for building enterprise-level and business critical applications with following features: Active user base and large community Modular architecture Video tutorials   Symphony This framework follows Ruby-On-Rails like programming methods. With factors like Ajax helpers, internationalization, admin-interface generator this framework makes it easy to develop web applications. Some of the useful features that Symphony offers are: ·         One-click admin interface ·         Built-in testing framework ·         Easy debugging ·         Logs to track app’s activities  Here’s a chart from Google Trends comparing popularity of different frameworks for last 12 months:    At the end, choose a framework you are comfortable working with. With all the details mentioned above, you can now figure out which framework meets the requirements for your project. Hope this